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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Not being offended, and not entering a dissociative fugue state and shaking and screaming and muttering for 30 minutes and quite disrupting the speech in the process, are very different things.

PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience.

Which, like I said, might mean that they'd have to avoid going to university altogether. It's probably nearly impossible to have an environment that both allows for a free-flowing exchange of ideas, and yet protects people with this sort of permanent mental disability.

But making an allowance for rape survivors to leave the room when there's going to be a live screening of Salò isn't all that hard, is it?

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Yes, they are very different things, which is why you are arguing against a strawman. You know perfectly well that letting someone voice his conservative political opinions is not going to trigger PTSD. Pretending to be offended in order to stop the debate is the left's version of invoking terrorism in ridiculous contexts.

The biggest irony, which you probably can't even see, is that your own comment is an example of the disturbing and vile speech you claim to hate ("sex dungeon", "POW camp", "Salo"). You didn't need to bring those up to make your point, but you did. Somehow disturbing and vile things like burning the flag and condoning drug abuse never seem to upset the left (and I could go on...), but talking about individual rights and respnsibilities does. Funny how that works.

I... didn't claim to hate anything? I was making an argument that some people will get sick from some speech. It's a medical issue, and there are several solutions. I'm not sure you read my comment charitably.

Now, I'm not from the US, haven't been to a university for quite some years, and so am not personally experienced with what these "safe zones" are about in practice, the politics surrounding them, etc.—but I was trying to say that, if they had any justification at all as a theoretical construct, it was in giving people with PTSD a way to get away from "broadcast all over campus" things like graduation speeches, if and when a planned speech is found to have content that might trigger specific kinds of traumatic stress attacks.

Not because it might offend someone. Not with voluntary ability to leave for any reason one might like. Just a medical excuse from attendance, like a person with acrophobia would get from a field trip to the roof of a skyscraper.

And again, even then, it might be better for those people to just leave the university campus, or avoid coming in the first place.

What is vile about burning a flag or condoning drug abuse? What does "condoning" mean to you?

If you cannot function in an environment without damaging yourself, then you need to deal with that first. If making accommodations for you is used to censor or affect the free speech of others then you are now the oppressor even if it not intentional on your part. Letting people use your condition to condemn or exile others is beyond wrong.

I once worked inside a social program and the first lesson is to heal. Painfully, that often means scar tissue. If you have trama from words, you need to deal with it, not hope the world will.

To clarify, I didn't mean to disagree with you about the severity or suffering of PTSD patients.

> PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience.

It doesn't even take something that severe, I have a friend who was working at a convenience store at the time when he got PTSD after going through two robberies in two nights, both times from people he knew. My understanding is that PTSD is triggered by episodes of severe, debilitating stress.

PTSD sufferers deserve the freedom of not reliving those episodes, and there are treatments available to help them. They don't have to avoid going to university altogether, they don't even have to wait until they're better thanks to the many online education options available these days.

> But making an allowance for rape survivors to leave the room when there's going to be a live screening of Salò isn't all that hard, is it?

Perhaps there was a miscommunication, but I agree with you on that. That's what I meant in my previous comment when I said 'if you don't like what someone is saying, walk away'.

> That's what I meant in my previous comment when I said 'if you don't like what someone is saying, walk away'.

Ah. See, I figured that with something like a graduation speech, 'just walking away' might be a bit fraught:

- First, you won't know what the content is until you're already there and hearing the things that could be PTSD-triggering, and by that point you already might be mentally "gone" and unable to escape; it would be preferrable to catch such things before then, which is what all that "Trigger Warning: pictures of torture" stuff is about;

- And second, things like grad speeches are usually put on loudspeakers and carried along across the internal campus PA and video-channel to PA speakers and TVs in various places, etc. It's hard to get away from such a thing, even when warned that it will contain something that might trigger your condition, especially if your life is effectively isolated to the campus (you live in the dorms, etc.)

It was under those two requirements that I saw the idea of a "safe space" as being possibly useful: it gives such people a place to go where they know the content won't follow them.

Under any other conditions, it's a horrible idea. :)

Are we not really reaching here with the graduation speech examples? Every graduation speech I've heard has been little more than encouraging platitudes. Hardly likely to trigger PTSD. When was the last time graphic torture or rape was recounted in a graduation speech?

I guess I am reaching. But like I said, I'm looking for a "steelman argument"[1] in favor of the idea of a "safe zone"—a worst-case one-off emergency scenario where it might be warranted to have one.

If we can agree that it's warranted in that case, then it becomes a matter of agreeing exactly when it becomes unwarranted—which is a much more fact-based debate to have than one where one side just shouts "Freedom of Speech!" and the other side just shouts "Freedom from Persecution!" and neither side believes the other's bullshit one iota.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

(Also, I think this is the most I've ever been downvoted for speaking in the classical hacker-vulnerability-probing "but what if a tornado of Hitlers hit the school?" style on HN. I'm not even using any inflammatory language or anything, whereas all the replies to me are acting as if I was some social-justice type spouting off about "my right to not hear some white cis male talk about the time he went to Vegas" or somesuch. It's interesting; is this one of those "if you try to take an orthogonal position then you're supporting neither side, so both sides see you as supporting their opponent and hate you" effects?)

We see what you're trying to do--the problem is that the general "think of the one terrible case" has been tarnished rather heavily in the last decades by people talking about "well, what if it stopped 9/11", or "well, what if it stopped the OKC bombing" and so on and so forth.

The idea of "well, in this one specific extraordinary case it's totally reasonable" is kinda played out among anyone with half a brain, because it's been used to justify so much bullshit.

Also, the entire dichotomy of warranted/unwarranted is suspect, but that's a different rabbit hole altogether.

The trouble here is that you're arguing from the enviable position of having a solution without a clear problem, and are trying to find a problem to justify it.

The concept got flipped in the chain here -- what is actually happening on these campuses is the establishment of "free speech zones", where a person can say what they like, and the establishment of rules that, on the rest of the campus, punishment will occur for saying things that could trigger or make someone feel unsafe.

So, what's happening is that an entire campus is made to be this "safe" area.

Is the assertion that there are so many people on any given university campus who might have a breakdown that the entire campus must walk on egg shells? Because that is the side of the debate you're arguing from.

2003 Rockford College, Christopher Hedges, at the very least, using a graduation speech to talk about the Iraq war and American empire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAmkMndtH24

And check out this article for an ironic inversion of politics in the short span of 12 years:

http://www.alternet.org/story/15982/the_silencing_of_dissent...

So you have people on the right were shocked and triggered, screaming at the speaker and pulling the power on his microphone, and people on the left demanded that hard truths must be spoken so suck it up. But I wonder if today he could do this speech without giving trigger warnings for colonialism and war. I wonder if a university would even give him the freedom up front to do a speech without vetting the topic so it couldn't surprise anyone. Is this a price we're willing to pay?

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